Schroders Investment Management (Luxembourg) has selected Clarient Entity Hub to support Know Your Customer (KYC) processing for intermediary and institutional investors at its Luxembourg funds hub, and to help counterparties complete their KYC processing on Schroders’ Luxembourg funds.
Before joining the Clarient Entity Hub, which offers a utility based service designed to simplify client data and document management, Schroders Luxembourg used mainly manual processes to exchange entity data bilaterally with clients and counterparties.
Noel Fessey, global head of fund services at Schroders, says: “KYC has become more demanding over the past 10 years. The list of documents to be obtained from a prospective customer or counterparty is long and ongoing review obligations mean documents must be regularly checked and renewed if necessary. We see Clarient serving a common interest, helping parties ensure they comply with their KYC obligations to appropriate standards, while bringing vital improvements to efficiency and usability.”
Schroders Luxembourg has completed the Clarient Entity Hub onboarding process and is working to add entities it does business with to the utility. It is one of more than 100 users of the utility, including Clarient’s six founder banks and its parent DTCC, and is expected to be joined by other business areas within Schroders over time.
Matthew Stauffer, CEO of Clarient Global, says Schroders’ decision to use Clarient Entity Hub reflects a broader industry trend as market participants move towards utility based services that aim to improve standards of KYC assurance and operating efficiency on an industry-wide basis.
Looking forward, he says Clarient is continuing to build out the Entity Hub platform with developments including a client entity data solution for Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II). The company is also adding datasets to the Public KYC Service it runs on the platform and is working to integrate its services with other DTCC data services such as Omgeo ALERT, the Global Trade Repository and the Global Markets Entity Identifier utility.
